I too "love villages and the idea of villages". My career has been spent in helping them to retain vital services or to replace these with volunteer-run alternatives like community shops. So I completely agree that in villages "people participate and outcomes matter".

As a community development officer I helped the small east Devon village of Plymtree to retain its school. Numbers rose from 13 pupils during the 1980s to more than 90 today. Similarly, in the 1990s I was able to assist the village of Allenheads, in Northumberland's wild North Pennines, to turn around its fortunes from a dead-end former mining community to a place where local people banded together to restore derelict properties. For me, Allenheads illustrates Jenkins' contention that "the fight to resist extinction is as admirable in communities as in the natural world". Viva "big society"!

However, I don't agree with him that "decades of the Archers ... have led rural communities to see themselves as victims". Let's face it, they are victims – in the sense that reports since the 1980s have persistently highlighted one in four of England's rural households living in or at the margins of poverty. It's popular media – including The Vicar of Dibley – that continue to stereotype twee villages, inhabited by bucolic locals, where everyone farms (in fact, UK Agriculture records that in 2006 Britain's farming workforce totalled just 184,000).

On the other hand I do agree with Jenkins that this rural idyll is seen to represent an "innate goodness that trickles down to all society". When the first world war poet, Rupert Brooke, famously wrote: "That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England", the image is not of Haringey but of the Cotswolds.

So I look forward to the localism bill, translating "fierce social protectionism" from nimbyism (not in my backyard) to "imbyism", a can-do approach built on the back of new neighbourhood plans.

Finally, while I agree with Jenkins about "the value of self-government", he should have mentioned the actual and potential power of parish and town councils, which are surely critical to converting the government's localism agenda from words to reality. He quoted several philosophers, but I would return to Alexis de Tocqueville, a 19th-century Frenchman in the US: "The strength of free peoples lies in the local community. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people's reach."